French style has been long mythologised, but the reality (not Bretons, boucle and cigarettes, necessarily) is both harder to define, and far more alluring.
As the creative director of Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghèsquiere is a man better equipped than many to tackle that enigma. In his latest collection for the Parisian mega-maison, unveiled at the Musée d’Orsay yesterday, he proposed a kind of haute haphazardry: embellished slip dresses with super-long knitted scarves, sumptuous pyjamas not to be confined to the bedroom, neat little belted dresses with exaggerated sweetheart necklines. In not proposing a prescriptive, singular ideal of French style, he offered something better and more accurate: je ne sais quoi.
